Bonum Certa Men Certa

Professor Lisa Larrimore Ouellette Questions Whether Patents Work When Patent Scope is Too Broad

Patent systems don't exist in a vacuum...

Lisa Larrimore Ouellette



Summary: Citing MIT economist (and MacArthur “genius”) Heidi Williams, Professor Lisa Larrimore Ouellette from Stanford challenges old myths and quotes: “we still have essentially no credible empirical evidence on the seemingly simple question of whether stronger patent rights—either longer patent terms or broader patent rights—encourage research investments.”

TODAY we intend to publish a lot of articles about the USPTO and some of these will be relatively long. As usual, we are going to focus on software patents. After that, for at least a fortnight, I'll be away on holiday and won't be able to cover much.



"In the case of software, for instance, pace of innovation is high, code can count as prior art, code can be modified, forked, reused etc. and there are many programming languages with copyright assigned to underlying implementations."Last week an article titled "Do Patents Work?" was published by Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, Assistant Professor of Law at Stanford. Our position is that patents work, but not when everything under the sun is patentable. One must not lose sight of the collaterals/externalities; Always check economic impact in said domains. In the case of software, for instance, pace of innovation is high, code can count as prior art, code can be modified, forked, reused etc. and there are many programming languages with copyright assigned to underlying implementations. There is thus not much evidence that patents on software "work" or are even needed in the first place.

Here is what this Yale Law School graduate wrote in her analysis, which focuses on pharmaceutical and chemical industries:

As everyone who has taken a patent law course knows, the reason we have patents is to increase private incentives for knowledge production. But do patents actually work? Based on her review of the existing evidence, MIT economist (and MacArthur “genius”) Heidi Williams isn’t sure; she concludes that “we still have essentially no credible empirical evidence on the seemingly simple question of whether stronger patent rights—either longer patent terms or broader patent rights—encourage research investments.”

This bottom line will not be a surprise to those who have followed the empirical literature, but Williams’s careful identification and modeling of the relevant empirical parameters and her discussion of the most relevant evidence on each point makes her review a must-read for anyone interested in patent policy.

[...]

On the second question, the ex ante incentive effect of stronger patent rights, there is again survey evidence, though it is useful primarily for indicating that the pharmaceutical and chemical industries value patent protection much more than other industries. To empirically estimate the relationship between patent strength and research investments, some researchers have looked at the impact of national patent law changes and found little effect. But one would expect such studies to understate patents’ impact: increasing protection in a small economy will not noticeably increase innovation in that economy if domestic firms were already innovating for the global market.

[...]

In the biomedical context, evidence from survey results and some clever instrumental variables studies of patent applications on human genes and patents invalidated in court have suggested that upstream patents have little effective (positive or negative) on the quantity of downstream innovation. But invalidation of patents in fields such as computing and electronics appears to increase the number of innovators subsequently citing that patent.

[...]

The bottom line is that despite the vast number of empirical patent studies—Williams notes the 3000 citations to a foundational patent-citation paper—very few studies have convincingly tackled the causal link between patent policy and research investments.


That point about "research investments" is often being exploited by pharmaceutical giants that 'invest' (funnel) massive profits not in research but instead give that money to shareholders. They just tell the public (and public officials) that those massive profits somehow "save lives", by latching onto the "R&D" mythology.

"They just tell the public (and public officials) that those massive profits somehow "save lives", by latching onto the "R&D" mythology."What we are seeing in the news this month is the ITC weaponising patents for embargo, e.g. of drugs that are about to save lives. See this news report which says "practitioners suggest that pharmaceutical companies are beginning to look to the International Trade Commission (ITC) as an appealing alternate venue for patent litigation."

People and firms go to the ITC when they want embargo (or injunction).

"Firms that stand to profit from the UPC are not credible when commenting on the prospects of the UPC."Injunctions, incidentally, are what makes the UPC very dangerous to Europe. The UPC is largely backed by pharmaceutical giants; this has long been known.

Barker Brettell LLP, already mentioned here in relation to the UPC earlier this year and last year, wrote another article about the UPC (actually promotional piece in its corporate Web site) and it is noted as saying: "Irrespective of Brexit, the unitary patent (UP) agreement may come into force by early next year" (not a statement that the general public agrees with). Firms that stand to profit from the UPC are not credible when commenting on the prospects of the UPC. They just try to attract business. We certainly hope that more people now understand that patent maximalism is quite a disease; believing that the more patents we grant the better off we will be is misguided, especially when more radical measures such as embargoes are introduced. Later today we are going to show examples of software patents utilised for software embargoes (impacting small companies in Europe).

Recent Techrights' Posts

Links 28/09/2023: Preparing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.9 and 9.3 Beta
Links for the day
We Need to Liberate the Client Side and Userspace Too
Lots of work remains to be done
Recent IRC Logs (Since Site Upgrade)
better late than never
Techrights Videos Will be Back Soon
We want do publish video without any of the underlying complexity and this means changing some code
Microsoft is Faking Its Financial Performance, Buying Companies Helps Perpetuate the Big Lies (or Pass the Debt Around)
Our guess is that Microsoft will keep pretending to be huge, even as the market share of Windows (and other things) continues to decrease
Techrights Will Tell the Story (Until Next Year!) of How Since 2022 It Has Been Under a Coordinated Attack by a Horde of Vandals and Nutcases
People like these belong in handcuffs and behind bars (sometimes they are) and our readers still deserve to know the full story. It's a cautionary tale for other groups and sites
Why It Became Essential to Split GNU/Linux Stories from the Rest
These sites aren't babies anymore. In terms of age, they're already adults.
Losses and Gains in an Age of Oligarchy - A Techrights Perspective
If you don't even try to fix something, there's not even a chance it'll get fixed
Google (and the Likes Of It) Will Cause Catastrophic Information Loss Rather Than Organise the World's Information
Informational and cultural losses due to technological plunder
Links 28/09/2023: GNOME 45 Release Party, 'Smart' Homes Orphaned
Links for the day
Security Leftovers
Xen, breaches, and more
GNOME Console Won’t Support Color Palettes or Profiles; Will Support Esperanto
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Let's Hope GNU Makes it to 100
Can GNU still be in active use in 2083? Maybe.
GNU is 40, Linux is Just 32
Today it's exactly 40 years since Richard Stallman sent a message regarding GNU
GNU/Linux and Free Software News Mostly in Tux Machines Now
We've split the coverage
Links 27/09/2023: GNOME Raves and Firefox 118
Links for the day
Links 27/09/2023: 3G Phase-Out, Monopolies, and Exit of Rupert Murdoch
Links for the day
IBM Took a Man’s Voice, Pitting Him Against His Own Work, While Companies Profit from Low-Effort Garbage Generated by Bots and “Self-Service”
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Links 26/09/2023: KDE, Programming, and More
Links for the day
Mozilla Promotes the Closed Web and Proprietary Webapps That Are Security and Privacy Hazards
This is just another reminder that the people who run Mozilla don't know the history of Firefox, don't understand the Web, and are beholden to "GAFAM", not to Firefox users
Debian More Like an Exploitative Sweatshop Than a Family
Wiltshire is riding a high horse in the UK, talking down to Indians who are "low-level" volunteers in his kingdom of authoritarians, guarded by an army of British lawyers who bully bloggers
Small Computers in Large Numbers: A Pipeline of Open Hardware
They guard and prioritise their "premiums", causing severe price hikes due to supply/demand disparities.
Microsoft Deserves a Medal for Being Worst at Security (the Media Deserves a Medal for Cover-up)
There are still corruptible/bribed publishers that quote Microsoft staff like they're security gurus
Real Life Should be Offline, Not Online, and It Requires Free Software
Resistance means having the guts to say "no!", even in the face of great societal burden and peer pressure
10 Reasons to Permanently Export or Liberate Your Site From WordPress, Drupal, and Other Bloatware
There are certainly more more advantages, but 10 should suffice for now
About 200,000 Objects in Techrights Web Site
This hopefully helps demonstrate just how colossal the migration actually is
Good Teachers Would Tell Kids to Quit Social Control Media Rather Than Participate in It (Teaching Means Education, Not Misinformation)
Insist that classrooms offer education to children rather than offer children to corporations
Twitter: From Walled Gardens to Paywalls and/or Amplifiers of Fascism
There's moreover a push to promote politicians who are as scummy as Twitter's owner
The World Wide Web is Being Confiscated From Us (Like Syndication Was Withdrawn About a Decade Ago) and We Need to Fight Back
We're worse off when fewer people promote RSS feeds and instead outsource to social control media (censorship, surveillance, manipulation)
Next Up: Restoring IRC Log Pipelines, Bulletins/Full Text RSS, Wiki (Archived, Static), and Pipelines for Daily Links
There are still many tasks left ahead of us, but we've progressed a lot
An Era of Rotting Technology, Migration Crises, and Cliffhanging
We've covered examples from IBM, resembling the Microsoft world